Take a detailed view on Social Media Sales and what small businesses can do.
Success in online sales is characterized by reaction times.
Customer requests that are answered in less than 5 minutes increase the probability of a sale up to 54%. The first to reply to a customer inquiry increases his probability of a sale to about 238%. A study published by the Harvard Business Review evidenced that among 2,241 U.S. companies only 37% responded to customer inquiries within 1 hour, about 23% of those firms did not respond at all, obvious evidence of an unprepared and over-burdened sales structure.
Despite all the statistics, the important question for small companies today is: Are you prepared?
Given the fact that about 78% of today’s consumers and employees trust Internet recommendations, while only 14% of consumers trust in traditional advertising or in television advertising (18%), any successful sales strategy must include the impact of social media.
Social media has won considerable importance in the sales process and it has become an important distribution channel, which is especially interesting for companies with niche products they can be marketed directly to a targeted social group.
What content does your target group see, share, comment, select and manage online? Participation in social networks is only the first step; building trust in your brand is the ultimate goal. One way to generate trust is to offer creative, freely accessible content on a regular basis that is of value to your followers.
Small Business Sales in Social Media
Ask yourself:
- Is there an interface between your online presence and your sales department?
- Do you know how fast your reaction times are when a customer sends an email to your company?
- In which online communities should you be represented and what online communities do your employees participate in?
- Which blogs do your customers read and what are they interested in?
- How many followers do you have and on which social media platforms?
- How much website traffic do you have? How often was your company name retweeted or mentioned?
- Is your newsletter successful?
- Are bloggers critical of your products?
- Did you use this criticism for your continuous improvement? Did you communicate this?
